Quotes About Evolution

The present is the key to the past

Hitherto, no rival hypothesis has been proposed as a substitute for the doctrine of transmutation; for 'independent creation,' as it is often termed, or the direct intervention of the Supreme Cause, must simply be considered as an avowal that we deem the question to lie beyond the domain of science .

Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was sufficient, and species may have been created in succession at such times and in such places as to enable them to multiply and endure for an appointed period, and occupy an appointed space on the globe.

The automobile is technologically more sophisticated than the bundling board, but the human motives in their uses are sometimes the same.

down one giant spiral

I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.

Paleolithic landscape:

Dubbed the evolutionary happiness function, the equation explains the psychological process that both fuels our desire for bigger homes and ensures that we will be dissatisfied shortly after moving in. Dissatisfaction, it suggests, is inevitable.

I propose another explanation: The reason so many Americans have become alienated from government since the poll of 1964 is that government really has become more incompetent and really has become alienated from the public it is supposed to serve. Political cycles and political fashion have nothing to do with it. American government isn't what it used to be.

But it was not until Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740 and, a decade later, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, that the novel reached the form as we know it today, and opened an outpouring of work in 19C that would transform literature throughout the West.

To live in today's world is not only to have access to all the best that has come before, but also to have a breadth and ease of access that is incomparably greater than that enjoyed even by our parents, let alone earlier generations.

The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960.

natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution. There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."6

What does not change / is the will to change.

What never changes is your desire to change

the management of a polity, there needs to be an end of things.

The Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and the glory of the universe, proceeded.

A hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits.

Man with all his noble qualities… with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, and when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.

Both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—the mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.

I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, would have been differently tenanted.